In the internet world, for people to spend time on your website, you first need to make that website easy to use. One of the best ways to do this is, of course, to increase the speed of that website. So, what exactly does website speed mean? Loading time is when it takes for any page or content on a website to become visible to the user. Here, the shorter this period, the more you can increase the user experience. So, explore the GTmetrix Speed Test now!
What Is GTmetrix?
GTmetrix is a tool that offers website optimization recommendations. Optimization recommendations help you to increase your website’s speed in order to eradicate the errors and slowness of your website. One of the best things about GTmetrix is that GTmetrix provides detailed reports about performance enhancement. Let’s look at other things that GTmetrix offers to its users:
- Speed Score: Speed Score shows if your website works well or works below average.
- Page Load Time: This feature calculates how long it will take for your website to load itself fully.
- Page Size: This feature of GTmetrix measures the size of your website. This is connected to the page load time process because, depending on how big of a size your website has, loading times will increase.
- Recommendations: GTmetrix provides you with recommendations in order for you to enhance your performance. One of the recommendations that GTmetrix offers its users is optimizing your website’s images, which is crucial for your website if you especially run an e-commerce website.
As you can see, GTmetrix provides not only better performance and optimization for your website but also it provides user satisfaction and better rankings for your website. When you rank up your website, you will attract more visitors to your website, and you will have a chance to reach the masses one day.
How to Use GTmetrix?
We told you about GTmetrix overall, but do you know how to use GTmetrix? If you do not know or do not have any idea about how to use GTmetrix, that is completely fine. Because we are here to help you with how to use GTmetrix in this title. We will teach you how to use GTmetrix for your e-commerce website or any kind of website in these steps:
- Access
Go to the GTmetrix’s website. - URL
There is a text box that allows you to check your website’s URL. Checking your URL is simple: you just need to write your website’s URL into that text box and test it. There is also a part where you can test your website’s speed with GTmetrix page speed. - Test Location
Since GTmetrix allows you many test locations. With this feature, you can choose a location that is close to where you live. - Start the Test
When you write your website’s URL, you need to click the ‘’Test your site’’ button and start the test. The test will calculate your website’s performance. - Results
It will take a couple of minutes to get your results because GTmetrix calculates a number of tests of your website’s URL. - Report
When GTmetrix successfully completes the test, you will get feedback about how to enhance your website’s performance and increase your website’s speed. That way, you will have a chance to work on your negative sides and fix the errors on your website. As a result, you will improve your website to the point it will be closer to perfection.
How Does the Speed of Your Site Impact User Experience?
Optimizing your website is not enough for your website to reach your goals. The only thing for you to be able to maintain your website’s work is the users you have. If you cannot satisfy your website users, you will lose your users. And if you lose your users, you will not be able to maintain your website. Satisfying users is a difficult job to overcome because users are prone to be annoyed by almost anything. The most common reason for them to feel annoyed is the speed of websites. Time is important for you when it comes to running your website. If your users spend too much time loading your website page, they will get tired of waiting and leave your website.
So, do not forget the fact that user experience is extremely important. Of course, this is not the only reason to be annoyed in terms of website speed. There are also other ways for your users to feel annoyed by your website’s speed:
- First Impressions: Before users see your website’s content, they will come across the loading page. This is where everything gets serious because that will be the first impression for users. In order to abstain from speed issues, you can use the GTmetrix speed test and take precautions if your website has a slow speed.
- Mobile Experience: Attracting mobile users to your website is a necessity because there are more mobile users in web traffic than desktop users. Since page loading on mobile devices takes a lot of time, you need to offer your mobile users a website without speed issues so that they will not leave your website.
- Ranking: Google takes into account your website’s speed when measuring your website’s ranking. If you constantly check your website’s speed in the GTmetrix speed test, you will not have a problem with speed issues.
You can also check our free website speed test.
The Role of Site Speed in SEO
Your website’s speed is important not only for your users but also it is important for SEO. As we mentioned previously, SEO considers a website’s speed when measuring rankings of websites. However, there are also other ways for website speed to impact SEO:
- Mobile Optimization: Since mobile users are more than desktop users, your website’s speed for mobile users is extremely important for SEO. Check our mobile-friendly test tool.
- Competitive: In the competitive world, first impressions will always be crucial. Users will always choose faster websites over slow ones.
- Bounce Rate: The more your website has a high bounce rate, the more your website’s ranking in SEO will decrease.
Also, check out page speed and SEO relation in detail.
The Main Features of the Speed Test
Let’s assume you have a WordPress site for you to understand the GTmetrix Speed Test. When you do a speed analysis on this site, GTmetrix Speed Test will offer you:
- With Google Lighthouse integration, you will have the chance to learn your site’s performance score in detail. Performance testing is carried out by Lighthouse with various metrics. The score you get here will give you information about what you need to improve.
- As you know, there are many metrics that can help you find page load times on a website. Among these, you can find out the real milestones with the GTmetrix Speed Test. This tool will provide you with your Largest Contentful Paint, Total Blocking Time, and Cumulative Layout Shift scores.
- Increasing your site in terms of performance is an excellent opportunity to increase the user experience. So, it would be an extremely good advantage to discover the metric that has the highest impact on the user experience and focus on it. You can do this thanks to the GTmetrix Speed Test.
Tracking Performance
You can find out the current site performance with Speed tests. Well, wouldn’t it be nice if there was a system that regularly checks the load speed with advanced analysis options and gives you alerts at certain thresholds?
- You can monitor the pages on your website with GTMetrix. With daily, weekly, or monthly regular tests, you can allow the performance to remain at an optimal level.
- Are you particularly curious about the evolution of a specific performance metric from the past to the present? Learning this can be a particularly good way to discover what optimization is contributing to what. Thanks to this system, you can create and watch a special history page for each metric.
- Web Vitals constitute an important part of the performance score of your web page. Also, Page Timings and Total Page Size are some of the important factors that affect your performance, too. GT Metrix warns you when there are certain changes on your website regarding these scores. This way, if something is going wrong or going just as it should, you will be notified right away!
- Discovering what’s going on on your website in terms of performance can now be easier than before. Because you can visualize the development with various graphics. As you can imagine, this visualization process allows you to plan a much better optimization process. So, what are these graphics? Here is the ordered list:
Web Vitals
Page Timings
Page Size & Request Counts
Performance / Structure scores
Recommended GTmetrix Speed Test Analysis Services
If you want to do a web speed test on your site, you can do it easily. So, what exactly does GTmetrix offer?
- This tool, which measures the experience of a real user on a mobile device thanks to real-time simulation, offers you a field survey of your site. This can enable you to get stronger results even from lab-based Google Lighthouse experiments.
- You can measure the performance of your site through more than twenty different mobile devices and thus obtain the most realistic results.
- In addition, in the process of optimizing your site for mobile users, you will need to be constantly updated about your site’s page load time. Because only in this way you can understand how much improvement the actions you take. Mobile analytics provide exactly that.
Recording Your Website Loading Process
What kind of problems may be experienced during the loading process of your website? Discovering this actually means observing the performance metrics presented to you through tools such as Google Lighthouse. What content is loaded first? How many seconds do you have to wait? You can use the GTmetrix Speed Test to explore this and much more.
- Consider recording the loading process of your website.
- You can watch the recorded video by rewinding. During this viewing process, you can slow down the video up to four times if you wish.
- The smart recorder detects crucial moments in the page-loading process. This way, you can jump directly to the key moments about page loading.
- Remember the monitored alerts you set for your website? Here, when a change occurs that causes monitored alerts to be activated, the automatic system can record this moment on the video if you wish. This way, you will see that the situation is realized with this alert, and you will have the chance to watch the moment the situation happens. You need to use GTmetrix PRO for this.
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These days, performance is the top priority for developers and regular consumers. Want to know why? Then check out the page speed and SEO relation in our other review.
Concluding the Speed Test
Explore the GTmetrix Speed Test by reading this article in detail. Remember that you need to carefully measure and monitor performance metrics for your web page to deliver a truly powerful user experience. Hopefully, we successfully explained everything about GTMetrix for you. Don’t forget to check your website speed regularly to stay up to date!
1 Comment
Great article! GTmetrix is a great tool to help improve website speed. However, I think it could be improved by providing more detailed results and suggestions.